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  • Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form by Benedict Taylor
  • Laura Tunbridge
Mendelssohn, Time and Memory: The Romantic Conception of Cyclic Form. By Benedict Taylor. pp. ix + 303. (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2011, £55. ISBN 978-1-107-00578-5.)

Mendelssohn’s name glows in boldface on the dust jacket and spine of Benedict Taylor’s monograph, indicating the author’s determination to prove that the works under discussion are ‘quite extraordinary’, ‘unprecedented’, and ‘remarkable’ (p. 1). Mendelssohn’s use of cyclic form, according to Taylor, demonstrates that he was the first of the post-Beethoven generation to ‘engage convincingly with the compositional issue of musical form and large-scale coherence in instrumental music’ (p. 1). Taylor makes his case carefully and convincingly, and the volume represents a substantial contribution to the understanding of cyclic forms in nineteenth-century instrumental music. The overview provided by the opening chapter will be a useful reference for students, and the lengthy accounts of individual works (material from two of which previously appeared in 19th-Century Music, 32 (2008), 131–59; and Musical Quarterly, 93 (2010), 45–89), supported by dozens of music examples and analytical diagrams, offer a variety of perspectives on the (inevitably) recurring themes of time and memory.

Scott Burnham’s striking claim that ‘in 1820s Berlin, everybody was a Hegelian’ is quoted approvingly in the course of Taylor’s discussion of Mendelssohn’s Octet Op. 20, a work he considers analogous to Hegel’s 1807 tract, Phänomenologie des Geistes (p. 57; Burnham, ‘Criticism, Faith and the Idée: A. B. Marx’s Early Reception of Beethoven’, 19th-Century Music,13 (1990), 187). It’s a virtuosic reading, but I wonder whether it is today’s musicologists, rather than those nineteenth-century Berliners, who have really fallen under Hegel’s spell—in this regard, it is interesting to read Taylor’s book in tandem with Janet Schmalfeldt’s In the Process of Becoming: Analytical and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (New York and Oxford, 2011), which is similarly enchanted by Hegel’s Geist.

But at least Mendelssohn knew Hegel. The other models to whom Taylor turns in his interpretations of time and memory are Henri Bergson, Marcel Proust, T. S. Eliot, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Forty pages into chapter 4, Taylor reveals that the preceding ‘discussion of the cyclic nature of time in [the A minor Quartet] Op. 13 has been based on Proust’ (p. 165; to be fair, a clue lay in the chapter title, ‘In search of lost time’). Writer and musician are ‘an unlikely pairing’, he admits, but shared ‘remarkable affinities in treatment of time, narrative and memory’ (pp. 165 and 167). The musical work that most closely parallels the structure of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Taylor goes on to argue, is not by Beethoven or César Franck, as is commonly held, but by Mendelssohn: namely, his A minor Quartet. It might be ‘highly unlikely’ that there is a direct connection between the two works, but then Proust recognized that ‘the language of our day’ might suddenly strike us on reading a passage from the Iliad and that we can often find ‘extratemporal connections’ between the ages (pp. 166–7). There are shades of Slavoj Žiž ek’s plagiarism of the future here and, though Taylor’s sensitive account of the cyclic processes in Mendelssohn’s work adds to our understanding of the musical form, what is gained by the Proust comparison is unclear.

Apart from that, the link with Proust serves to make Mendelssohn into a modern. Others have argued a similar case from different evidence (see, for example, James Garratt, ‘Mendelssohn and the Rise of Musical Historicism’, in Peter Mercer-Taylor (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mendelssohn (Cambridge, 2004), 55; and Greg Vitercik, ‘Mendelssohn the Progressive’, Journal of Musical Research, 8 (1989), 353–74); Taylor here presents the composer as somehow out of time, his approach to form separating him from the previous generation. Yet Mendelssohn suddenly turned away from using cyclic forms, and indeed from instrumental composition, in the early 1830s. Taylor gives personal and professional reasons for the change...

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